I used to skip the lounge access also, but its a nice perk. It has decent internet, some snacks until I eat on the plane, and foremost comfortable seating. I don't like a lot of noise around me as well, so its a break from the rest of the airport bustle. I fly business when available because many of my flights are 13hrs-ish. I'm oversized, so I literally have to fold myself up to fit within my space in coach. That's fine for 2hrs, but not more. I can't sleep sitting up. That's a long 13hrs staring at the seatback display of the plane going around the world.
I scored a mid-level membership once. I didn't go out of my way to do it. Nothing super good about it.
Oh, your luggage gets a priority tag and comes out first. In certain airports that can save an hour of your life.
But mostly its about accumulating miles on trips I'd be taking anyway. Essentially free upgrades, or entirely free flights. Just for joining their silly program. Why not?
I think this is mostly a solution without a problem. Just to hit a few points--S3 might (and I'm not sure I agree) be expensive. However, it gives you HA and multiple copies of your files on the backend for safety. If you're serving a lot of images, owning that hardware can be very costly. Also, when cloudfront was tested the results were pretty good. Easy to implement, not much more expensive than S3 alone. Our EC2 costs dwarf S3, and our site is very image heavy.
In the past years I've gone from a 15" MBP to an 11" MBA and most recently the 12" MB.
I hate the MB. The key travel is way too short and have seen no signs of adjusting. The lack of expansion ports is criminal. Just one more. It's the little things--like no led to indicate charging/charged. I use it for testing for work, but that's about it.
My MBA plugs/docks into my cinema display. Keyboard and mouse are plugged into the display USB hub. Ethernet on the other USB port. When I travel it's super light.. no complaints.
Just for reference, the MBP was just too heavy and hot. Lugging around the 15" in a backpack around airports all day was not comfortable.
I wasn't happy with the Lenovo laptops, so I went Apple. Now? Not sure where to go.
I work remote, and worked even more remotely for a year. Yeah, this was just a 2mo bit of fun. Great. But longer stays in Thailand quickly run into immigration law.
If you're having power outages or brownouts, you want voltage regulators and UPS'. Bad power will wreck your electronics. It's good to have a backup internet connection as well. I've had outages lasting up to 3 weeks, and what are you really going to do about it to motivate a telephone company to work faster?
The 37signals people created a short book about working remotely. At about the same time as I was having problems with someone not overlapping their hours with the rest of the team, their book pointed out the same issue. If you don't overlap, people will become isolated in a very bad way. If you hire someone you just have to clarify the expected hours upfront.
S3 is going to be a lot cheaper. It isn't perfect, but it's pretty reliable. Then you can look at cloudfront. And they did recently release cross-region S3 replication. Then you can be really safe and keep a backup copy at a whole other location.
This would be big for us. When we initially looked at the problem of sharing or keeping a large number of files in sync, the prospects were dim. DRBD? etc. So we ended up using Gluster. Gluster has been temperamental at best. We've been able to move some data out and into elasticsearch, but not all. So, I've nudged my AWS rep and signed up already. Reliable NFS is good for me.
We couldn't find a solution either, so we built a posix filesystem with S3 backend backend that is easy to run and scale. If you want to give ObjectiveFS (https://objectivefs.com) a try, I'll be happy to hear your feedback.
I recently switched back to Firefox exactly for this reason. Firefox has tab overflow so that I can actually tell what an open tab is. Additionally, Firefox can be set to ONLY load the current tab on startup. Have you ever been to a hotel and opened your browser only to be presented with a captive portal? With Chrome all of your other tabs are now going to that page also. It caused me lots of sadness once.
I maintain a work and personal instance of firefox. When things seem a little sluggish I move open tabs related to projects into a wiki. Or, if its just something I wanted to 'read later'... I read it.
Any time I move, I try to divest myself of at least half of everything I own. I've moved with only what I could fit into luggage. The take on it that I'm more comfortable with now is--if I want it, I want something really nice. I work for a site that specializes in antiques and collectibles and such. If I want something, I go searching for a special example of that thing. It sheds at least part of the disposable nature of things.
I scored a mid-level membership once. I didn't go out of my way to do it. Nothing super good about it.
Oh, your luggage gets a priority tag and comes out first. In certain airports that can save an hour of your life.
But mostly its about accumulating miles on trips I'd be taking anyway. Essentially free upgrades, or entirely free flights. Just for joining their silly program. Why not?
I do the same with hotels.